What is it with Parking Garages?

So much of the modern world consists of driving cars and running across their related paraphernalia. I ran to the top of the parking garage. The fog was thick below the apex, but the top level of the garage peaked out above it. It was as if the top of this garage was adrift in a grayish white sea of cloud. I jumped down using a grappling hook, went into the arcade and found the door. The woman on the other side said "try your best to avoid this!" and jabbed at me with a syringe. She was beautiful. I was deft but stuck with the needle nevertheless.

Blue

Leaning against a dome carved rock a French veteran stared ahead with one eye at a bright red pole that shined back at him between the throngs of people walking through the memorial's pathways. His upper lip was a mound that curled over the usual dip, like an orange rind, exposing a nicely arranged row of white teeth. The nose was absent, the crater suspending the rind, and a custom eye-patch supported itself upon the lip's ridge with a small girder, a bird's foot perched on a ball. His navy cap read "Bordien", and although an incision's rivet bit into his eye's puncta he stared with wise intensity through the commotion; simply waiting for the initiation of some act which would be the consillatory or provocative end to his ownership of the scene before him. He stood grotesque and magnificent in a shabby oil-stained tweed jacket, the gravitational effect of wearing the Médaille militaire and Croix de guerre straightening out the patch over his left breast. If one stood directly before him he appeared like the keystone in a relief, a liminal welcomer to to the somber tended parade grounds and the dark unparallel strokes of the forest beyond. Seemingly preoccupied with his role as gatekeeper, the soldier cocked his head slightly when from behind the red pole he spotted the darkly tanned and mud spattered face of a vagrant. Immediately the two were entirely engaged with one another. The soldier looked over the vagrants face for signs of horror or disgust, either of which would satisfy his strange hunger. The vagrant upon studying the veteran's face stared back blankly with an expectant aire which circumscribed his métier. As the vagrant approached the veteran was struck by the wild stormy-wave pattern of hair, and an impasto of filth which striped the forehead's brow-lines and nose; this face was a rough churning sea. Pidgeon cooing relieved the two of their silent duel, and the connection was broke.
Below the pidgeons the vagrant settled amidst a pile of trash opposite a relief station. These streets, the avenues bustling with a happy city's retinue once lay shattered. Planks of wood, doorframes, tapering piles of mortor littered with clock springs and brick rubble; these erstwhile estaminets, cathedrals and brownstones were the clarion call of the trash in a veteran's mind. In a vagrants mind they were a boon, a source to sustain lifes condition, such as it was.

"To feel embittered by it would be like blowing on cigarette ash", someone said from the shadow of a pin-stand a little down the avenue. All ages were here, and life was seen from many angles as the defunct and young held and assayed one another in capricious spells of regard. The carnivalesque impression was made a project by young boys standing grey and infantesimal beside gleaming convoys of cavarly come home from the Verdun. To a child's untrained eye, this terror combined with the streaming tears of wives and fathers equated roughly to a vision of manhood. But there were things missing as well. Where were the clean argent bayonets, the bicorns, and triumphant faces? After all, hadn't the War been won?
Had the children asked him, had they enough courage to ask him the only question of great import, the one both his presence and his chasseur comrades' collective absence incited in young minds, he would have replied simply: "No. War is cold", and let that fester. The veteran had heard from someone that the reason why murder was immoral was because it robbed a person of his or her future. Watching these young children, he was pained by the innefectual nature of his observation-- his field of vision such that focus was easier, the periphory less significant, but this clarity of tunnel vision only increased a sense of an overarching lameness and a surging calamity. Here in the spotlight was the reverent glaring of a girl of six regarding the roundly handsome mustachioed, face of a radiating young Dragoon patrol officer, having never seen combat himself in Armiens-- a fate to which he saw assigned the men who marched in his wake: pasty white, both eyes forward, dead, capped in fetching bearskin. Later, a young boy and his obvious demimonde mother's turn at concocting demigods to the tune of forty young cavalrymen gliding atop black bicycles--toys on review! In sometimes dizzying pangs, the eyes of others and the one he had left to witness them confirmed that his physical appearance couldn't show the depth of his wounds, it needed extracting from him. But why be serious? The War was over and the solution to the riddle presented by the veteran's appearance was thus paradoxically barred to children, the only recipient for whom his scars were designed.
The forest sighed through the crowd and the veteran flipped his collar, burying his head into his chest, while keeping his eye on the red of the pole. The world expanded, like drapery then cascaded back down as the gale passed.